Boy

Out of the blue, I'm sent another memoir in which I figure. A flattering portrait of me as an undergraduate, which I'm glad of, but which I barely recognize.

At the same time, taking heavy blows to my self-esteem. The truth of the matter is, I have no idea who I am. And of course, it doesn't matter in the slightest. No matter who I am, I have to do everything a great ape does. I don't believe in personhood anyway. But God, how it matters to us, this fiction! I hung on every word about myself, just as if I had any more significant connection to that young twenty-year old than with any other who wandered the world in in 1978. We really believe all this stuff, that origin is identity, and that what others see will make something real about us.

No. If it wasn't real before, it's not real now.

I got a request from a lawyer for the SOAP notes from a couple massages I did, and I don't have them. I never billed insurance for the massages, and so I never wrote up the SOAPs, and the notes are long gone. I feel horribly, horribly unprofessional, on so many levels. It's a lot easier for me to disregard the memoirist's picture of me than it is to disregard the picture of me that phone call formed in my mind, of a complete flake of a therapist. It was a bad period of time for me, and I was dropping lots of balls back then, but dropping balls in your personal life is one thing: dropping them in your professional life is another.

There's basically nothing to be done, but to confess I don't have the notes (which I did on the phone), and to write down what I remember, though I can't imagine it will be of any use to them.

Oh, young Dale is not happy with himself, no, Precious: not happy at all.